


Merely Blood, Not Magic

by AParticularlyLargeBear



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Blood, Blood Magic, Depression, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Mental Health Issues, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-13
Updated: 2015-06-02
Packaged: 2018-03-30 10:34:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3933523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AParticularlyLargeBear/pseuds/AParticularlyLargeBear
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>From a prompt on the DA Kink Meme: It's been a year since Hawke became champion of Kirkwall, and she's struggling, seemingly unable to drag herself clear of a creeping black depression. One evening, she finds momentary relief in a self-destructive path, and devoid of any other means to cope, turns increasingly to self-harming to stave off the bleak numbness. When this is discovered, however, assumptions are made; what motives could a mage have for drawing their own blood than forbidden magic? The burning question becomes - Is Hawke a blood mage?</p><p>Huge TWs for mental health, self harming behaviour (cutting), and general depression throughout.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Original prompt found here: http://dragonage-kink.livejournal.com/13010.html?thread=54157010
> 
> I really cannot impress enough that this is likely to be tough reading if you have any kind of problem with blood and/or graphic depiction of self harming. If that's likely to bother you, I strongly recommend steering clear.

Willow Hawke tilted back the wine bottle, tipping almost vertical to her mouth, but finding it empty. She gave it a vaguely accusatory glare. Since when had she drank it all? She didn’t remember finishing the bottle. Actually, she didn’t even remember how long she’d been sprawled out on her couch for, staring at the ceiling. Three hours? Longer? Time was difficult to keep track of.

She gave a long sigh and dropped her arm, the empty bottle touching the ground with a dull clink. After a moment, she let it go, hearing it roll off along the floorboards. Willow allowed her fingers to trail on the floor, pressing down, then relaxing.

It took her a few seconds to muster the motivation to turn her head, eyeing the cabinet that stood against the far wall of the room. There was more wine in there and Willow wasn’t, she decided, nearly drunk enough right now.

That posed a new problem. To retrieve another bottle would require actually getting up. Hawke contemplated that challenge. A malaise hung over her, a sapping cloud that wore away at her energy, siphoned every ounce of desire she had to _do_ anything. She considered it to be an accomplishment that she’d made it out of her bed and downstairs today. She’d eaten, even. At least, she thought that she’d eaten. Had that been today, or yesterday?

Willow weighed up how badly she wanted to be drunk with how little she wanted to move. The debate took her a few minutes. The couch was comfortable; there was a nice, Willow-shaped impression in the cushions after lying on them for so long. Staying was also the easier option, given it didn’t entail actually doing anything. Maybe she’d be able to fall asleep as she inspected the chandelier, and then she would have a few hours where she didn’t have to think about anything at all.

Hawke had been sleeping her way through a lot of days, recently.

On the other hand, alcohol also had a reasonable chance of helping her out, insomuch that getting drunk was something of a faster track to not having to have her brain engaged even slightly. She’d never been much of a drinker in the past, too many worries about making a fool of herself or otherwise doing something stupid. Well, no need to be concerned about her reputation; the only person in her estate right now, as for the past week, was Willow. Bodahn and Sandal had been staying in the merchant’s guild, showing off some of the boy’s enchanting work to interested parties.

And, well…

There wasn’t anyone else.

Maker, how could a year have already passed since her mother’s death?

Willow pushed herself up into a seated position, even that small movement feeling like she was trying to wade through a sucking mire. She paused. Uncomfortable prickles were making their way up and down her legs, courtesy of not moving them for so long. There were a couple of seconds where neither limb responded, and then her bare feet twitched, and life flooded back into her muscles. With a slight grumble in the back of her throat, Willow swung her legs out from the couch and around, soles touching the cool boards for another good few seconds before she finally hauled herself up onto her feet.

Shambling across the room, barely bothering to lift her feet from the floor, Hawke made it to the cabinet and pulled open the polished pine door. She picked out the first bottle to catch her eye and tugged it from place. There was only the slightest hesitation before her other hand snagged a second bottle by the neck and removed that one, too. She wouldn’t need to bother getting up again once she inevitably finished the first bottle, less effort all around as she stumbled her way through another torrid day.

Willow turned back to the couch, not bothering to close the cabinet, and walked back. Placing both bottles on the floor alongside, she flopped right down to where she’d been before, practically identical in position.

Then there was a knock at the front door.

Hawke closed her eyes, gritted her teeth, and waited. She got occasional visitors, often enterprising salesmen trying to spin her a story of how their marvellous product would change her life in hitherto undiscovered ways. There were also, however, a subset of people who could be reasonably expected to stop by every so often, particularly when she hadn’t been making her own house calls. She struggled briefly to remember when she’d last spoken with anyone, and quickly gave up. A while. Willow didn’t move. Fast-talking sovereign spinners and well-meaning friends were equally unwelcome at this moment. The latter group, however, were the ones more likely not to give up and leave.

Another series of knocks, a familiar rhythm, _rap, rap, rap, rap-rap-rap_ , three deliberate, weighty thumps against the door, followed by another three in rapid succession.

Flames. Willow recognised that pattern.

“C’mon, Spooky, I know you’re in here.”

Of _course_ it would be him, and Hawke knew from experience that he wasn’t going to give up. Thrice-damned dwarf.

A heavy sigh accompanied Willow rising to her feet for a second time, dragging her way over to the porch, deliberately dawdling in the vain hope that Varric would think that she wasn’t home if she stalled for long enough.  He wouldn’t, of course, but she could have her dreams.

Willow made it to the front door and paused, closing her eyes, taking a deep breath, steeling herself. She could do this. Only a conversation. Just tell Varric that she was fine, no she didn’t need anything, sorry about missing Wicked Grace at the Hanged Man, she had been a little under the weather. Just exchange a few words, produce a vague facsimile of normalcy, and then she could go back to her solitude. She coached herself through an imaginary conversation, then exhaled the breath and opened the door.

Sure enough, a blonde-haired dwarf stood just outside, a crossbow slung across his back and his shirt open to display his prodigious chest hair. Varric’s usual easy smile was absent as he regarded her with a critical eye.

“So, you got some kind of pyjama party going on in there, or have you seriously not bothered to get dressed by mid-afternoon?” Varric sniffed. “I really hope that’s the reason. It would explain why you’ve been drinking this early in the day.”

Willow looked down at the long nightshirt she’d been wearing for the past three days, and then back up to glare at Varric. “Did you come by just to lecture me, Varric? I don’t tell you how to dress,” she could barely raise the energy to be angry with the dwarf. In a way, she was grateful to have evidence that it was still possible for her to have an emotional reaction to anything.

Varric held up both hands, winced. “Sorry, Spooky, I’m just worried about you. I haven’t seen you in over a week, and neither have any of the others. It’s bad enough with Merrill spending all damn day in front of that mirror of hers without you staying cooped up alone in here, too.”

“I’m fine,” Willow answered mechanically, like she’d rehearsed in her head.

“No offence, Hawke, but you’re some way off fine. When’s the last time you left the house?”

Willow hesitated. That question wasn’t in the script. Varric looked at her knowingly, and she gave him another glare.

“If you have to think that long about it…”

“Varric, please,” any and all anger suddenly dissolved into nothingness, dissipating into a crushing haze of apathy. “I just… I haven’t been well, all right?”

Varric cocked an eyebrow.

“It’s some kind of flu or something. I’m not sure.”

The dwarf sighed. “Spooky, when you’re sick, you take every opportunity to inflict your misery on absolutely everyone else. The last time you had a cold, you told me, and I’m quoting here ‘that it felt like you had the Second, Third, and Fourth Blights inside your skull’, then flopped into Fenris’s lap whining like a six year old. You had hay fever. The same hay fever you’ve had every spring since we first met.”

Hawke just looked at him. Her shoulders slumped a little. “Did you come here for a reason?” she sounded drained, even to her own ears.

“Like I said, I was worried. You missed our card game, you sent away the only other people who live in this place, you haven’t spoken to any of your friends and…” Varric trailed off, winced. “I… know it’s been a year, Willow. You don’t have to suffer through this alone.”

“It’s not to do with mother,” Willow replied, omitting a ‘just’ from there.

Varric nodded. “Look, whatever the reason, just do me a favour and get some air, all right? Go for a walk, visit the market, get some sunlight. It’s not good to be locked in a house all day.”

“If I say yes, will you leave me alone?”

A pained expression crossed Varric’s face. “If you say yes, I’ll be back in a couple days to make sure you’re doing all right. I’m here for you, Spooky, we all are.”

“Fine. I’ll get some air,” she lied.

He looked at her in silence for several seconds that seemed to stretch for minutes. He opened his mouth as if to speak, then shut it again, shook his head, reached out and patted her on the arm. Varric hovered for just a little longer, then turned to leave.

Willow shut the door before he’d taken three steps. She turned, then slumped against it, the back of her head thunking dully against the wood.

She couldn’t gather the will to return to the couch. She allowed herself to slide her way down the door and to an approximately seated position on the ground. After a moment, she tucked in her knees, hugging them to her chest.

Truthfully, she wasn’t capable of explaining what was wrong even to herself. It was as if something had crawled underneath Willow’s skin and crushed her emotions in a brutal stranglehold, squeezing the life out of them and then screwing them into a ball and tossing them aside. The feeling wasn’t sorrow or guilt, it was just a bleak melancholy… nothingness.

Willow would have taken sadness over this numb state of simply… existing. She would have taken anything.

And she’d tried to snap herself out of it. She really had. She’d made an attempt at reading what felt like every book in her library, giving up all of them after just a few pages, then not bothering to return any to their rightful places. She’d attempted to practice spells for a short while, but then realised that this miasmic daze probably wouldn’t be the best time to risk attracting the attention of any demons to her. For a time, Willow had made good progress on that scarf she’d been knitting for Fenris, and then she’d noticed a mistake in the pattern. That had been the death knell to her motivation to continue. It wasn’t even a major mistake, would only have taken a few minutes of work to fix, and it had nevertheless made her feel worthless. She’d put the scarf down and hadn’t looked at it since.

All that and more. Even drinking was only a minor respite. The solace of alcohol didn’t so much allow her to feel anything as make her not care that she wasn’t feeling anything, at least for a few hours. She supposed the pounding headaches were something, but she couldn’t really count getting hungover as an emotion.

It was half an hour after Varric’s visit before Willow rallied herself sufficiently to bother moving again, and then only because she figured that the oblivion promised by the bottle was marginally better than sitting here hoping that she’d suddenly start feeling better.

She picked herself up off the floor, slowly ambled back to the couch for a second time. It was modest consolation to realise that this would be the last time she had to force herself into motion for the foreseeable future. An afternoon of lying collapsed on the sofa beckoned. Heck, maybe she could make an evening of it, really cut loose.

There was a _flump_ as Hawke flung herself bodily back onto the cushions. She lay there face down for several minutes, and then her hand began to grope along the floor next to the couch, seeking the bottles she’d brought over. However, without sight to guide her, she underestimated how close they were, her hand slapping against glass with a dull _plink_ and knocking it over. Willow made a terse noise of exasperation, adjusted slightly, and retrieved the bottle that was still standing upright.

She raised it up to her mouth… and then stared.

The top was sealed, because of course it was. She’d forgotten all about that little detail. That was easy to do when she was in this state; all the nuances of anything and everything just slipped away from her unless she was concentrating to the utmost extent of her abilities. And of course, she could forget any hope of finding focus when she could barely spur herself into motion. Naturally, the corkscrew was over by the cabinet, where she’d used it to open the first bottle that she’d drank, then just dropped the tool onto the floor.

For _fuck’s_ sake.

A giddy instant passed where Willow felt on the verge of breaking into laughter at the ridiculousness of it all.

And then that was replaced by a brief surge of rage, white hot and irrational and all-consuming because why the fuck couldn’t _anything_ go right for her?

Willow hurled the bottle to the ground, where it shattered in a crimson explosion of glass shards.

They scattered everywhere, skittering across the boards into every corner of the room. The wine sprayed out in a dark red flood, liquid crawling from the point of impact, forming an erratic pattern of droplets that would no doubt stain.

Willow found it difficult to care. The anger died as quickly as it had come, but what remained was a, well…

She stared at the shallow pool decorating the floor, sharp pieces of glass visible here and there amidst the red. She found herself transfixed by the sight, an anarchic splatter that evoked images of blood and violence and more, besides.  Hawke smiled with absolutely zero humour. Even now, barely functional, she was still capable of destruction. Often, she wondered if that was all she was good for. Some _Champion_ , who couldn’t do anything to prevent her city being plunged into chaos, who had ousted the qunari invaders by killing their leader, who … who hadn’t been fast enough to save her mother. Maybe the templars had it right about mages being dangerous. Everything she touched wound up dead.

Willow’s eyes drifted over the mess, morbidly fascinated. One of the larger pieces of the broken bottle lay nearby, a jagged and ugly thing, tapering off at one end to a particularly cruel-looking edge. Hey, there went an adequate representation of her state of mind.

Hawke wasn’t sure when she decided to pick it up, only that after a hazy instant, the shard of glass was in her hand. Wet from spilled wine, the liquid dripped onto her hand, seeping into the channels of her palm, as if the skin was daubed with blood.

Her breath caught. What if, she wondered, it wasn’t simply a resemblance?

Without thinking, Willow pressed the glass to the inside of her left forearm. The point dented into the surface, leaving a mark on the soft, pale flesh.

She held it there, poised.

And then she pushed down. Hawke felt the surface of her skin give way… and break.

Blood welled up around the incision, beading bright and gleaming and perfect. A shiver ran down her spine.

For several seconds, Hawke kept the glass there, digging just a little into her flesh. The hair on the back of her neck was standing up, a buzzing, electrical sensation fizzing around the surface of her skull.

Willow dragged the shard downward, almost dreamily. She let out a hiss of pain from between her teeth, but the discomfort was nothing to the surge of adrenaline she felt as she sliced a cut down to the crook of her elbow, almost five inches. In the wake of the sharp edge, more crimson, stark against the pallidity of the skin.

She gave a shuddering breath and, with a sudden snap of the head, came free of her daze, if only for a moment.

Hawke pulled back the instrument of her harm, stared at it. Stared at the cut.

It wasn’t a serious wound. She’d suffered worse in battle and laughed it off gamely. She’d certainly caused far worse to others. However, that this was self-inflicted, that she’d taken something sharp and pierced her own skin. This was… this wasn’t…

This was the first time Hawke had _felt_ anything in what seemed like an eternity. And maybe the sensation was a dizzying rocketing of her pulse, heart hammering a thousand miles an hour, fit to burst. Maybe it was a queasy combination of giddying excitement and uneasy disgust.

But it was _something_.

Enthralled, Willow glanced back to her arm. The trickling from the shallow cut was accumulating in the crook of her elbow, overflowing just slightly, spilling over to either side. In a morbid way, the contrast of the red against her skin was incredibly beautiful.

She wondered if it would look quite so fascinating on the opposite side of her arm, where the skin was dappled with freckles.

And the moment that thought crossed through her mind, it was as if an invisible puppeteer had tugged upon her strings, as if she were not Hawke, but rather watching from over her own shoulder as her body followed the commands of a part of her she hadn’t known existed before tonight.

The motions were more assured now, more certain of what it was she was doing. There was almost a flourish as Hawke dragged the glass shard across the back of her forearm, just a little below the wrist. That same incredible, foreign shiver as before sent tremors all across her body as she gouged a deeper gash into her flesh. This cut bled more heavily, and satisfied at least for now, Willow held up her arm to watch the macabre display of her own blood rolling its way down her limb.

She was panting a little. Maker’s breath, but she’d at last penetrated the suffocating numbness, she finally felt as if she was _alive_ and not just going through the motions, dragging herself through the day simply because there was nothing else to do. Hawke relished the pain, welcomed it. She wasn’t just the Champion, some impossible, invincible ideal. She could feel. She could be harmed – by herself, even if nobody else was capable of doing so.

Hawke closed her eyes, exhaled, and dropped the broken piece of bottle on the floor. Laying down on her side, she cradled her injured arm close to her body and, every inch of her prickling with little electric jolts, she lulled herself to a disturbed, dream-plagued sleep.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All the same warnings as previous apply.

Hawke’s eyes fluttered open, vision bleary and a scratching under her eyelids. Any sleep, she supposed, was better than no sleep. Her arm remained tucked in, and after a few seconds, she remembered. She was almost afraid to look down, knowing what sight awaited her there. What she’d done… yesterday? Was it yesterday, now? There wasn’t any light shining through her windows, but she’d had the curtains drawn so tight for so many days that it was a little academic.   
  
She couldn’t lie to herself, though. She couldn’t pretend that she hadn’t done it.  
  
As if on a string, Willow’s head dropped.   
  
Dried blood caked both sides of her arm, dark smears across the flesh. Around the cuts, it had crusted into a pair of ugly scabs, wetness still glistening beyond the dark coating. The cushions of the couch were smeared red too – her wounds must have taken some time to close while she was sleeping.  
  
Willow grimaced. While the sight made her stomach twist with disgust, it was difficult to draw away her fascinated eyes from the display. She’d done that. She felt something other than the excruciating blankness.  
  
Letting out a breath that shuddered through her lungs, Hawke brought forth her magic, trickling out into her hand, warming the tips of her fingers with the familiar glow. She traced her index along the wound on the inside of her arm, a shiver of something close to excitement running across the limb as she slowly sealed the cut. Hawke held back the bulk of her power, keeping it behind the dam, ensuring that while the gash was closed, the flesh remained red and raw. She was loath to remove the evidence, as if faking, as if-  
  
She needed the proof. She needed to be able to look with her own eyes and know that there was something other than the bleak darkness of her own mind, something that could actually permeate her malaise.  
  
Hawke turned her arm over and healed the second cut, much like the first. This one was deeper, took a little more effort, and the mark that it left was more obvious, redder, skin slightly puckered into scar tissue. Lazy, Anders would have called it, chided her, said that she could have repaired the damage much more cleanly.  
  
But he wasn’t here. Nobody was.  
  
Pushing herself into a seated position, arm still drawn tightly across her stomach, Willow shook her head from side to side, as if that’d be enough to dispel what plagued her. She’d made a breakthrough, but it was an unsettling one, a solution that worked for all the wrong reasons.  
  
Yet, if it worked, well… what did it matter? This didn’t harm anyone else, so why shouldn’t she?  
  
Hawke was reaching down for the broken piece of bottle again before she even realised she’d decided to do so. The colour of the glass was distorted by the coating of her blood upon it, the dim light from the chandelier refracting strangely from the imperfect lense.  
  
She hesitated as her hand hovered over the bottle.   
  
She could do better than this.  
  
She could… could do something else.  
  
Hawke pulled back her hand with a jerk, clenching her eyes shut, and turned away, twisted, stumbled to her feet, nearly falling straight over the couch. She managed to regain her balance though, and proceeded to all but flee for the stairs, staggering and swaying drunkenly, having to put out a hand onto the steps not to fall straight onto her face.  
  
And she _was_ running. She was doing all she could to get away from down there, from what she’d done to herself. Maker. That wasn’t right, that wasn’t-  
  
Hawke wrenched herself to the right as she crested the top of the stairs, pulling away as hard as she could from her mother’s old room. She couldn’t lay eyes on it for an instant, not when she was feeling like this.

The door to her chambers loomed large like the gaping maw of a demon. It was every inch of effort just to drag herself through that threshold, collapsing onto the boards of her room. Her vision spun around her in mad spirals, unable to focus on anything for more than the briefest of instants. Willow’s stomach churned, and she retched on her hands and knees, throat convulsing, shoulders heaving as her gut attempted to divest itself of contents that it didn’t possess. That didn’t prevent the taste of bile creeping into the back of her mouth as she trembled her way through the choking gasps.  
  
Willow let out something like a sob as they finally subsided, leaving her feeling more drained than ever before.   
  
She forced herself into a crawl. If she could just make it to her bed, she could collapse. Even though she’d just awoken, every fibre of her being felt weary, devoid of energy or motion. Hawke longed to wrap herself in her covers and perhaps never resurface.  
  
After an indeterminate length of time, Hawke’s hand hit the bedframe, and she clung to it like flotsam in a stormy sea, as if it was all that was keeping her afloat.  
  
It took everything she had to haul herself up onto it, rolling across the covers bonelessly.   
  
Hawke lay there. Minutes may have passed. Hours may have passed. All she had to tell the time by was her own tremulous breaths.  
  
Eventually, she mustered up the strength to move again, dragging herself further up the bed. If she could just lay her head on the pillow, perhaps she’d-  
  
Hawke’s hand touched something hard and cold beneath the pillow. She froze.  
  
A hilt, cool against her palm.   
  
The knife under her pillow. The knife she’d kept because – who knew – turned out that incinerating a would-be burglar made for an investigation that it was difficult even for Aveline to cover up.  
  
Willow clenched her teeth.  
  
Her hand clenched the knife.  
  
She drew it out from its berth.  
  
The blade was nothing special, really. It was a simple, ordinary dagger that was intended solely as a precaution; a bluff to look dangerous without needing to resort to spells. Willow had spooked herself when she’d reacted so violently to an intruder into the estate; emotions running out of control were one risk no mage could afford to take. While it had been just a few days after her mother’s murder, while she had hardly been in a fit state of mind… that wasn’t the type of mage Willow wanted to be. Nobody’s first response to danger should be immolating the threat on the spot.  
  
Hawke turned the knife over and over in her hand, rolling it along the palm and then back. She couldn’t take her eyes off the sharp edge, glinting in the dim light.  
  
How she’d broken through the numbness just with an imperfect edge…  
  
What could she do with an elegant, sharp blade?  
  
Hawke twisted the blade inward and – _jerked it away from herself with all of her might, because this was messed up, she couldn’t keep doing this to herself. And she held it at a distance, screwed her face up tight, and hurled the blade across the room as hard as she could, sending it clattering into the far corner as she stumbled out of bed and_ \- pressed the sharp tip against the inside of her bare thigh.  
  
The dagger was well honed. It took only the slightest pressure for the skin to part in the blade’s wake, a cut that burned white hot almost the entire length of the muscle, slicing a groove that was raw for just an instant, and then filled, welling up with beads of crimson.  
  
Hawke’s mouth hung open for a second, a gasp of pained ecstasy, because it hurt, but the sting was chased by a shivering heat that seeped into her very bones.  
  
It was revolting.  
  
Deep red rivulets began to stream down her thigh, a trickle that quickly flowed down onto the sheets, a dark rose blossoming across the fabric. Transfixed, Hawke reversed the knife, flicking it almost carelessly across her left wrist, crossing the mark left by the first cut she’d made.   
  
Willow stiffened, her body hunching over in agony. The casual cut had gone deeper than she’d intended, or at least, deeper than she _thought_ she’d intended. As she watched the ragged gash begin to bleed freely, she couldn’t be so sure.

Her stomach rolled over, but her eyes were fixed, fascinated.  
  
She wanted to touch it.  
  
Dropping the knife, at least for now, Willow reached trembling fingers for the wound.  
  
Thrills of pain jolted down her arm as her fingertips met the edges of the open injury, smearing it, smearing them.   
  
Willow pulled back her hand and found a tremulous smile playing across her lips. Maker, she could _feel_. Her heart yammered at a hundred leagues an hour, adrenaline coursing through her system. Just as before, the disgust at what she was doing was overwhelmed by the delight at breaking her daze, washing away the ennui on a tide of mutilation.  
  
Hawke brought her fingers up to her face, smudged blood across her nose, marking herself. She let them trail down, dragging the stain further, past her cheek and to the line of her jaw.  
  
Shivering, her hand again warming with her magical energies, Willow touched the wound on her wrist a second time. She kept at bay all but a sliver of her strength, healing the cut ever so slowly, drawing the process out, leaving the gash raw and only partially sealed up.  
  
The laceration on her thigh, she left alone.  
  
Willow’s gaze dropped back to the knife again.  
  
She reached for it.  
  
The next… minutes? Hours? Were a daze.  
  
Hawke cut herself open, healed the wounds, and then cut herself again, spilling more blood each time, leaving more and more of the injuries barely knitted together. The main victims were her arms, carving a latticework of angry red slices along the inside of her forearms, wrist to elbow, even the biceps in places.   
  
She kept away from the knife at times, even threw it away once or twice, but she always retrieved it, always came back to it. She would negotiate with herself, say that it was acceptable to look at it, if she did not touch it, and then she would persuade herself that she could be trusted to hold the blade. Then, Hawke would tell herself that she wouldn’t make another incision, just touch the dagger to her skin, and then once more she would cut, telling herself that it would just be a small one, that this would be the last time that she hurt herself.  
  
She must have slept at some point, because her magic ran dry to the point of exhaustion, and she just couldn’t muster up even the slightest spark of healing. Even then, she made another two gashes across her lower abdomen before finally collapsing into bed, awaking to sheets swimming with blood and every inch of her body roaring out as if it were aflame. Hawke relished that, she embraced it, even as she worried and picked at the newly formed scabs, managed to haul herself to the kitchen and finally eat, even if it was a stale chunk of bread.  
  
For a while, even, she didn’t go back to the knife, content as she was to bask in the prickling, delicious agony that ran across her body every time she so much as moved.  
  
But eventually the exhausted numbness seeped back in, pressing down upon her shoulders like a great weight. And Hawke started craving the rush, started needing it like an addict their next fix. Just that next little cut, just so she could remind herself she was real, she was alive, she could feel.  
  
Then the magic ran out again, and she curled up into a ball on her couch and rocked herself to sleep, only for the cycle to begin anew when her eyes reopened. How long had passed? Days? Weeks? Time seemed to lose all meaning.   
  
At some stage, Hawke found herself lying on the floor in the centre of her living room, just staring up at the ceiling. Her chest rose and fell, and each motion sent trickles of pain across her torso. She hadn’t cut herself as badly, there, but her nightshirt was still tacky, sticking to her, soaked through with her own blood. Willow’s arms were far worse, caked to the elbows with streaks of dark crimson. How much had she bled? Had she not been healing herself with magic, she’d like as not have fallen to pieces by now.   
  
The knife, she knew, wasn’t far from her hand, a short ways off to the side. She felt- good wasn’t the word. Something else. Something other than bleakly depressed. She supposed in that regard it almost counted as good.

 _Thump, thump, thump._  
  
Hawke barely stirred. Her heartbeat? No, it seemed to come from a distance, but where could…  
  
 _Thump-thump-thump._  
  
No, that was familiar. She’d heard that not long ago, hadn’t she?  
  
Muffled sounds. Voices?  
  
Willow levered herself into a seated position.  
  
 _THUMP._  
  
The door. Somebody was at the door.  
  
“Hawke! If you don’t open up, Broody’s kicking the door down!”  
  
She tried to find words. They rasped dead on a dry tongue.  
  
A pounding crash, the front door giving way, and Hawke hissed with pain as bright light assailed her eyes, sunlight for the first time in many days landing upon her.  
  
“Maker’s breath! Hawke! What the fuck is going on here!?”  
  
A snarl.  
  
“Blood magic.”


	3. Chapter 3

Hawke’s eyes were bleary as she tried to focus on the figures in the doorway, silhouetted against the light. One short and broad, one taller and much more slender. The sun glinted off the silver of the latter’s tattoos.

Varric’s mouth hung open, stricken, for the first time Hawke could remember utterly speechless.

The elf alongside him… trembled. Shock, anger, intermingled with utter disbelief writ large across his face. His eyes were horrified, appalled. Fenris was not what Willow would call composed, but she had never seen him like this.

They shouldn’t be here, neither of them should be. She didn’t want anyone witnessing her weakness.

“How… could you possibly…” Fenris faltered, stumbling over his words, voice choked with rage. “I trusted you, Hawke!”

Willow attempted to focus again. It was difficult, Fenris shifting in and out of a strange mist. “What?” she managed, uncomprehending. Her voice was a croak, cracked from disuse.

“Don't play the fool with me, mage! Do you mean to tell me you shed your own blood by mistake?”

“Hawke…” Varric’s jaw worked. His voice was a hoarse whisper, but it carried like a clap of thunder in the silence. “Please tell me that this isn’t what it looks like.”

Willow blinked at him. There were words somewhere, explanations. Only, when she turned inward to try and find them, they slid between her grasping fingers.

“Why wouldn’t it be?” Fenris snapped. “Sooner or later, every mage desires more power. We were foolish to believe that she would be any different.”

No, that wasn’t… this wasn’t anything to do with magic at all. It was just… just a matter of… how could she possibly describe how she felt? It wasn’t mystical or arcane to not want to be dead on the inside.

“I just…”  it was a little murmur, sounded like a small child, like when she’d been small and in trouble with father. “…needed to feel alive. Like I was real.”

“Of course you did,” Fenris looked torn between storming off and stepping forward to strike her. His entire body was trembling with a rage he wasn’t bothering to even attempt to conceal. “Of course you _needed_ to do this. Of course you found some justification.”

Willow felt Varric’s eyes on her, the dwarf’s gaze tracing the network of torn, bloody flesh that made up her arms. He heaved a great sigh, covering his face with his hands, then dropping them. “We need to get her out of here, Fenris,” he said softly. “Remember what blood mages have cost her.”

Fenris looked from Varric, to Hawke, back to Varric again. His shoulders slumped, just a little. “She’s had a taste of that power, Varric. She won’t resist it. No mage does.”

“Which is why she needs her friends, don’t you think?”

“I… you’re right.”

Hawke shook her head. Why couldn’t they just leave her to this? It wasn’t much of a subsistence, barely scraping by, but at least she wasn’t affecting anyone else, at least she was only dragging herself down I this downward spiral instead of hurting everyone around her. She was good at that.

“C’mon, Spooky, up we get. You can stand, right?” Varric bent down, looped Hawke’s arm around a broad shoulder. She didn’t resist as he stood, but nor did she assist, and the dwarf gave a grunt of exertion as he hauled her up off the floor.

Dry, crackling pain ran across Hawke’s limb, sharp as scabs broke, cuts came apart and began to bleed afresh. It wasn’t even enough to spark an adrenaline rush any more, merely a sight for morbid fascination, staring at the blood trickling down her arms, seeping out onto Varric’s coat.

“Flames. Fenris, gimme a hand here.”

Fenris grimaced like Varric had asked him to take a run through the sewers. “She’s a blood ma-“

“ _Fenris_ ,” Varric’s voice was uncharacteristically dangerous. “She’s Hawke, and for once, it’s her that needs _our_ help. Can we agree that we both owe her that much?”

“Fasta vass!” the elf spat, but then knelt alongside Hawke, taking her other arm.

Weakly, she shied away. Why were they trying to help her? They didn’t need to do this. Surely there were better uses of their time than dragging some… failure out of a pit of her own design.

Neither of them seemed to care for her token resistance, and in short order, Hawke was on her feet, Fenris bearing the bulk of the weight. Deadweight, Hawke wasn’t putting much, if any effort into standing.

“We’ve got to get her to the Hanged Man.”

“The Hanged Man?” Fenris was incredulous. “That’s halfway across town!”

“Would you rather we dragged her into the keep, let every self-important noble in the city see their champion like this?”

Fenris scowled again. “I suppose not.”

Stepping away from Willow’s side for a moment, Varric grabbed an overcoat from the stand by the front door. Hawke had the vague, inappropriate thought that she would look rather silly walking around in such a heavy coat in this weather. Ridiculous to think that, when she was bleeding all over her friend.

Fenris kept looking at her, then looking away again, as if he couldn’t bear to keep his eyes upon her. Whenever Hawke’s glazed eyes tried to meet his, he jerked away his head with a snarl. He wasn’t holding onto her like a person, but like a thing – a dangerous animal.

“Maker’s breath, Spooky, what have you done to yourself?” Varric murmured, doing his best to slide the coat onto Hawke’s arms and around her shoulders. Another wince of pain, even the gentle brush of cloth settling against the torn flesh enough to irritate the wounds.

“I deserved it.”

 Fenris actually _growled_ to hear that.

“Easy, Fenris.”

“You heard her! She feels she deserves power!”

Willow fumbled for words, tripped over them, came out in a vague mumbling. She _wasn’t_ a blood mage. Just typical of her to cause more grief. She couldn’t even get harming herself right.

Instead she said nothing. Let Fenris hate her. Let Varric hate her. That would make it easier to forget, let her fade into the background, not worth wasting time on.

“We’re here to help, Spooky. Let’s get you to the Hanged Man, and we can sort out this mess.”

 

* * *

 

The walk across Kirkwall seemed to drag on for an eternity. It had taken more time than Hawke wanted to consider for Varric to coax her boots onto her feet, and from there, the trek had been simply interminable.

Willow’s legs just didn’t want to move. Void, _she_ didn’t want to move, and more than once, she attempted to flop down on the nearest area of ground that looked as if it would accommodate her. Each time, Fenris dragged her back up onto her feet, Varric supporting her, murmuring reassurances, that things were going to be all right.

What if she didn’t care about whether it would be okay?

Seeing the sign of the Hanged Man was almost an impossible surprise. Where had that come from? Last Hawke knew, they’d still been in Hightown, and yet…

Maker. She was in pieces. Shattered, broken pieces as jagged as any-

No. No. Not here, and they’d taken the knife away from her, besides. Couldn’t do that even if she wanted to.

Varric pushed the door open ahead of them, and Fenris bundled Hawke inside. Mid-afternoon, the bar was mostly deserted.

Such was her luck, though, that of course two people Hawke decidedly did _not_ want to see were occupying the room, apparently playing cards. At their entry, one of them leapt to their feet, brow crumpling in horror.

“Mythal have mercy! Hawke!”

A slender figure with pointed ears and intricate tattoos across her face was at Hawke’s side in an instant.

“Bloody flames. Did some gang jump her?”

Hawke dropped her eyes. She didn’t want to try to explain this. Not to Isabela, certainly not to Merrill.

“Questions later,” said Varric. “Let’s get upstairs. Some privacy. Pull bouncer duty for us, Rivaini?”

Isabela made a face, lips twisting. “You owe me a drink, Varric.”

“I’ll fill you in later. Daisy, give Fenris a hand with her.”

By degrees, the two elves more or less dragged Hawke upstairs, Merrill constantly shooting Hawke looks filled with worry and agitation. Fenris, on the other hand, pointedly studied anything _but_ Hawke as they made their way into Varric’s rooms. Isabela remained downstairs, near the door, frowning at the group's retreating backs.

Fenris all but threw Hawke towards a chair.

“Fenris!” Merrill snapped, keeping hold of Willow and steering her rather more gently into the seat. “She’s hurt!”

“Why don’t you ask her just how she was injured, mage?” Fenris’s mouth curled into a sneer. “I’m sure the two of you will have plenty of knowledge to share.”

“Hawke?” Merrill tilted her head to the side quizzically. Hawke looked away again.

“Those cuts, Daisy…” Varric still sounded strained, and very, very tired. “We think she was using the blood for magic.”

Merrill blinked. “Hawke? Have you been… trying to contact spirits?”

“ _Demons_ ,” growled Fenris. “They are called _demons_.”

“I don’t understand, Hawke. You always warned me they were dangerous. Why would you do this?”

“It’s not that, I just… it’s nothing to do with spirits,” the voice didn’t sound like Hawke’s own. Weak, wispy. “I just needed… I just had to… remind myself I could still feel anything.”

“Hawke…” Fenris, suddenly, had uncertainty in his tone.

Merrill took Hawke’s mutilated arms, grasping her gently by the wrists, eyes sparkling, welling up as she studied the wounds. “Oh ma’falon…”

Varric stared. “Shit,” he murmured. “Willow you… you just … did that to yourself?”

Hawke nodded slowly.

“Why?” Fenris asked, hushed.

“Even pain’s better than numbness.”

Arms were suddenly around her shoulders. They tightened into a fierce embrace, linking around Hawke’s back and squeezing hard enough to cause a gasp of pain as the wounds on her torso were aggravated.

A hug from Fenris, of all people.

“I’m so sorry,” he murmured close to her ear. “Those accusations were… unjustified.”

Another pair of arms joined Fenris’s, snaking around Hawke’s waist. A moment later, Merrill’s head was resting on Hawke’s shoulder.

“We’re here for you, Hawke,” her voice was thick with tears, and Hawke felt moisture that for once was not blood on her stained nightshirt. “You don’t have to go through this alone, do you hear me?”

A chuckle, forced, but there. “Maker’s breath, Spooky, did you have to take the nickname so literally? You scared the shit out of me. But… you’ve always had my back, Willow, so I’ve got yours.”

That was the final straw. The dam burst, and Hawke was wracked with great ugly sobs, the entirety of her frail form rocking and shaking with the intensity of the gasping, choking tears. She didn’t even attempt to hold them back, grief pouring out from her in a wave as Merrill and Fenris held her firm in their arms, Varric rubbed her shoulder.

Trembles ran through her, Fenris’s hand moving to the back of her head, cradling it.

“I… I don’t truly know what to say. Just know that I am at your side.”

Grief was something. The tears were something.

And maybe, surrounded by her friends, with nothing but their support, well… maybe Hawke could drag herself out of this pit.

Merrill squeezed Hawke’s hand.

The wounds would heal. The scars wouldn’t.

“C’mon, Hawke, let’s get you some rest. You can use the bed.”

Willow managed an unsteady nod, allowed Fenris to steer her to, with a sudden lack of any energy, collapse onto Varric’s bed. She rolled across the coverlet and then looked up at her companions.

“Stay with me? Please?”

“Ooh, can we snuggle? I love snuggling,” chirped Merrill.

For the first time in far, far too long, Hawke smiled.


End file.
